That’s where arabica coffee beans originated they’re native to both Yemen and Ethiopia. Over time, it came to mean coffee generically, not just coffee from that island.Īt the same time coffee was being produced in Indonesia, it was also being produced and traded in Yemen. They were essentially the original advertisers of single-origin coffee.įor some reason, the term java took hold with the public. They probably used the term java to refer to coffee beans grown on that island. They began moving into Southeast Asia and Indonesia and setting up coffee plantations on islands like Sumatra, Bali, and Java.
Well, Dutch traders at that time wanted to get in on the action. Remember how I said that coffee was exported from North Africa and the Middle East starting in the 1600s? The most likely reason a “cup of joe” means a cup of coffee is that joe is a shortened form of jamoke, which is a combination of the words java and mocha. So it doesn’t make sense that it generated a slang term that wasn’t popular until the 1930s. And the song was popular way back in the 1860s. The problem is the comic is making a joke, suggesting that when that song is played in a restaurant, it means a customer wants coffee. (7)Īnother theory is that this name for coffee is based on an African-American spiritual written by Stephen Foster, called “Old Black Joe.” There is a comic strip from 1911 that describes this phrase as meaning coffee without milk. So Josephus’s ban wouldn’t have had much effect on the average … well … the average Joe. So by 1914, the only hard stuff that would have been left was wine served in the officer’s mess. A daily ration of grog was once normal on Navy ships, but an 1862 edict put that practice to rest. The problem is most alcohol had already been banned on Navy ships 50 years earlier. So, the theory goes, sailors started calling coffee “Joe” to spite Secretary Josephus. After that, coffee would have been the strongest drink allowed onboard. In 1914, he banned alcohol from being served on Navy ships. One theory is that it’s named after Josephus Daniels, a U.S. One of the most common ways we’ve referred to coffee in the past century is to call it a “cup of joe.” Why do we do that? The real answer is that we’re not quite sure, but there are some theories. (5)Īnd of course, we have all the made-up names for coffee we could ever want, courtesy of today’s gourmet coffee shops: unicorn frappucinos and caramel flan macchiatos are just two of many. (3)Īmericans have borrowed the British expression “a cuppa,” referring to a cup of tea, and now use it willy-nilly to refer to a cup of coffee. Today, we often refer to coffee by the way it’s made: drip coffee, press coffee, moka pot coffee, instant coffee, and siphon coffee, for example. I can’t really imagine how they would have tasted. These three coffee substitutes were made, respectively, from rye, peas, and burnt bread. after the Revolutionary War, when Americans were abstaining from tea because of high British taxes, yet also suffering from high coffee prices. We’ve called fake coffee “Boston coffee,” “Canadian coffee,” and “crumb coffee.” These so-called coffees were made in the U.S. We’ve called bad or poorly made coffee “battery acid,” “belly wash,” and “sludge.” (4) And a certain brand’s coffee is sometimes called “charbucks” by those who don’t appreciate really dark-roasted coffee. Over time, we’ve come to know coffee by a bunch of different terms. (6) Battery Acid, Crumb Coffee, and Unicorn Frappuccinos Eventually, these all settled down into the coffee we know today. And the rest, as they say, is history.īack then, the word coffee appeared in a lot of different forms: chaona, cahve, kauhi, cahu, coffa, and caffa. The European aristocracy became enchanted by the thick, hot beverage. There, the Turkish ambassador to France, Suleiman Aga, helped to make coffee the “it” beverage in the court of Louis XIV. (6) That’s because coffee beans were first brought from North Africa and the Middle East into Italy in 1615, and then into France in 1644. It comes from the Turkish word kahveh, and it seems to have come into European languages around 1600. Coffee Comes From the Turkish Word Kahveh
Raise your mug and take a sip because today we’re looking at some of the weird words we use to talk about coffee.
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